The House of Representatives last week passed a Senate bill to include lime under Pure Food and Drug Control Act, a policy move intended to regulate the manufacturing of lime, also known as afok or bweesch.<\/p>\n
Senate Bill 19-97, authored by Sen. Teresita A. Santos (R-Rota), passed unanimously among all House members present during their session last Thursday.<\/p>\n
Santos\u2019 bill defines afok or bweesch as a \u201csubstance created from burning limestone in rock form that transforms into powder form and can be mixed with a liquid to form slake lime mainly sold and used for the purpose of chewing betel nut.\u201d Afok is the Chamorro term for lime and bweesch is the Carolinian term.<\/p>\n
The bill adds \u201cafok or bweesch\u201d a section in current law that prohibits a person from selling any food, drug, cosmetic, or device that is not represented by label.<\/p>\n
For lime, the bill mandates that its label have the name of the manufacturing company, distributor, place of manufacture, ingredients, and a warning label that states: \u201cThis product may be linked to oral cancer,\u201d among other requirements.<\/p>\n
Lime must be properly packaged in a container with an unbroken seal cover, per the bill.<\/p>\n
The bill also requires those who manufacture, prepare, preserve, package, or store lime for sale to have a food handler certificate and a sanitary permit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Commonwealth Legislature recognizes that the prevalence of oral cancer in the CNMI has increased substantially,\u201d Santos\u2019 bill states. \u201cAlthough afok or bweesch may not have a direct link to oral cancer or other deadly diseases, the Commonwealth Legislature finds that there is a great need to protect the people until complete studies are done pertaining to afok or bweesch and its link to oral cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The House of Representatives last week passed a Senate bill to include lime under Pure…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10071,42,67,1411],"class_list":["post-234348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-commonwealth-legislature","tag-food","tag-people","tag-senate-bill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}